If you’ve never been to a botanical garden, you are truly missing out. (Unless you hate beauty.) Botanical gardens are colorful oases in the midst of dull, smoggy cities—beacons of nature, reminding us that there is life outside the city.

​In ninth grade our Citizenship class required us to do a service project. We were allowed to choose our own project and our own non-profit that it would benefit. We’d then have to give a presentation about the non-profit and what we did. My friends and I organized a car wash, and I can’t remember for the life of me what we raised money for—I wanna say saving the children? As we got up to present, this other girl got up with us and acted like she had been part of our group! I was pissed off, but I wasn’t going to sell her out to the teacher—I was too meek. And so this sugar-snorting sneak in ninth grade Citizenship (that’s not a euphemism—she really did snort sugar) got an A on her presentation, and I got a valuable lesson in being in high school.

Suffice it to say, people who cut corners & pretend to be something they’re not still really grind my gears. What’s so hard about doing the work?! This is why I despise greenwashing. (Vocab primer: greenwashing means spending more money on marketing that you’re “eco-friendly” than actually spending money on changes to become eco-friendly—oh, and you probably kick puppies.) I know it comes from my overachieving school days, where I’d put in work and then other people would cheat or BS their way through an exam and get just as good or (heaven forbid) a better grade than me!

That's the face of an overachiever who never fully recovered from the stings of high school.